American Romanticism Sample Student Research Projects 2010

Helena Suess

Rescripting the Infinite: Borges and Romanticism

          Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was not an American and his work is not Romanticist in either the epochal or the generic sense. A twentieth-century native of Argentina who derogated “any human effort addressed at confronting life as a passionate, unjust, instinctive, or irrational force” (Alazraki 4), Borges wrote intellectual, self-reflexive, ironic poetry, essays, and fictions, pieces that critics typically locate among literary modernity and postmodernity. But if Borges is not natively American he is also not an exclusively Argentine artist, and his work if not specifically Romanticist nonetheless rescripts Romanticist tropes and types according to an epistemological aesthetics of Western modernity. This essay attempts to chart Borges’s relationship to Romanticism through three stories generally representative of his “esthetic of the intelligence” (Imbert 268; qtd. Wheelock 4). “The Library of Babel” reveals Borges’s aesthetics of symbolism, his quasi-mythic metaphysics and his notions of sublimity; this fiction essentially denies the possibility of transcendence but nevertheless locates the sublime in an impossible quest for epistemological totality. In the analytical detective story “Death and the Compass,” which owes much to Poe, Borges deploys Gothic effects in the theme and space of the labyrinth in order to achieve such a sublime, arriving at an epistemological arrest as potentialities of total knowing oscillate endlessly. Finally, Borges’s gaucho story “The South,” perhaps the most explicitly Romanticist of the three stories here treated, reveals through its nostalgia and idealism a Romanticist desire in the artist for an ideal life of pastoral sublimity he as a rational intellectual publicly denounced, and the methods by which such a sublime might be achieved through fiction. Together these stories identify Borges as what might be called a “qualified” Romanticist of the Twentieth Century, a writer of fiction deeply desirous of the truth of ideals but unable to separate himself from the modernistic knowledge that ideals, so intrinsic to Romanticist aesthetics, themselves are nothing more than fiction.

As an artist, Borges is not entirely Argentine in two senses. First, in the sense that in his home country his work is to a fair extent culturally and politically problematic. Repulsed by the populist regime of Juan Perón “the Unspeakable” (“Essay” 48), Borges stood among the “naïve intellectuals” that sided with the fascist ruling generals of Argentina and Chile who, before the Falklands War, “used their pretended allegiance to the West to cover up their crimes and atrocities” (Alazraki 5). (To be fair, in his old age Borges “became more aware of the atrocities committed by the [Chilean] junta” under Augusto Pinochet, from whom he had accepted the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit in 1976, and by the Argentine junta during the “Dirty War” of 1976-1983. As a result “[i]n his final years, [Borges] explicitly stated that he had returned to the anarchism and pacifism of his youth” [Boldy 42-3].) Likely this naïveté and intellectualism arose from the young Borges’s early retreat, due to physical frailty and poor eyesight, to a life indoors among books, away from the world of experience; Borges later admitted that until he reached his thirties he “felt ashamed … to be a bookish kind of person and not a man of action” like his grandfather the revolutionary colonel (“Essay” 24). Even in his early publications a target of many (though hardly all) Argentine critics, who “censured his cosmopolitism, his lack of commitment to Argentine realities, his contorted style,” Borges eventually came, from a non-Western perspective, “to represent … the denial of everything Latin-American” (6-7).

Which arrives at the second sense in which Borges is not Argentine: his work is firmly established in the Euro-American canonical tradition. Whatever of Borges’s formative aesthetic development did not occur in his father’s library in large part took place in Western Europe, where he went to school, read and idolized Schopenhauer and Walt Whitman, and associated with early Ultraists anxious to modernize Spanish literature.[1] Influenced toward skepticism by Macedonio Fernández—a writer who, though both contemporary and Argentine, Borges relates to Hume and Schopenhauer—Borges eventually distanced himself from the “timid extravagances” of his early Ultraism (“Essay” 35). He condensed his form into short fictions and pseudo-fictive essays of “representation, not of an actual experience, but an intellectual proposition” (de Man 57). These works, largely irrelevant to the socioeconomic situations of Argentina yet of great interest to poststructuralist and deconstructionist philosophers and critics, earned him critical acclaim throughout Western Europe and the United States.[2]

          As the work of a modern Western (or Westernized) artist, Borges’s fiction attenuates out of Romanticism in three senses: traditionally, ironically, and nostalgically. With respect to tradition, Borges read vastly, and as has been noted he was closely involved in Ultraism, continuing to write in the style for years after the movement ended (cf. Maier 1996). But his closest formal antecedents (both in emulation of and in rebellion against) with respect to Romanticism might best be located in the Symbolist poets, for example Baudelaire and Valéry, and through them the writers of the American Renaissance, especially Whitman and Poe. Though “Symbolist” is a loaded term, for this essay’s purposes it might in general be said to describe an aesthetic—as well as artists employing that aesthetic—that sought to expand (or perhaps reject) the practices of canonical Romanticism, in which “symbolic value was invested in a privileged object,” into a poetical scheme in which “all things have symbolic value.”[3] (Romanticist antecedents of this aesthetic might be located in Whitman’s anaphoral poetry and Poe’s self-reflexive symbolism, for example in “The Purloined Letter” [cf. Irwin 1994].) A fundamental example of the aesthetic divide between Romanticism and Symbolism can be seen in how the respective genres conceptualize nature: both are concerned with the sublimity and transcendent possibility they perceive in nature, but differ in their definitions and activations thereof. Writers classified as Romanticist frequently divide nature from civilization in order to symbolize the opposition of spiritual purity to material corruption; nature’s wildness represents an ideal state of being by itself transcendent over quotidian civilized life. For Symbolist writers, however, nature is more “the physical universe” itself as “a kind of language that invites a privileged spectator to decipher it”: reality as a metonymic order of symbols associated by “infinite suggestion and cross-reference,” not a symbolical dialectic between opposed specific terms. The “nature” of reality-as-symbol is not itself transcendent or sublime as such, but is instead the universal method of transcendence, of articulating inarticulable realities of emotion and sensation by process of allusion and allegory (Olds 156-7).[4]

Borges’s tale “The Library of Babel” creates a metaphysical scheme that literalizes before deconstructing the Symbolist aesthetic. This fiction (it is as much essay as story) presents the universe as an infinite and eternal (i.e., transcendent) Library. Each book in this Library is a unique deployment of an order of “twenty-five orthographic symbols”—twenty-two letters, comma, period, and space (Borges 113); no book is like another book except that all are unique in terms of content.[5] Given the magnitude of possible linguistic iterations (each gallery has twenty shelves, each shelf thirty-two books, each book four hundred ten pages, each page forty lines, each line approximately eighty characters), most books are meaningless jumbles of the orthographic symbols. But the narrator, a “librarian” like all humans in the story’s cosmos, notes that if the Library contains all possible orthographic combinations within its books, then each and every book that could possibly be written in any language—“Vindications” of the lives of every human being living, dead, or imaginable; proofs and refutations of absolute truths; compendia and catalogs (including false ones) of the Library itself—exists on some shelf.

This Library is then on all orders, from micro to macro, allusive to transcendent reality: in the Library “all things,” very literally, “have symbolic value.” The smallest symbols, the finite number of literal symbolic characters that make up language, allude to a fundamental organization in the chaos of infinitely unique books. The books themselves, the next order of symbol, allude to all other books and from there to the Library as a whole by their uniqueness: if one book is unique, by implication all are unique. Therefore the Library comprises a totality of unique linguistic formations, the comprehensible of which are for the most part beyond access. A median order of allusive symbol can be found in the design of the Library as a habitation. An infinite series of identical galleries, stairs, vents, latrines, lights, and sleeping chambers, the Library’s design alludes to the existence of some authorial principle that “prepared” the Library to support intelligent life and did so according to a serially repetitive logic. This suggests that the books are meant to be read, though by whom and for what purpose if any remains unknowable to the librarians; presumably there is a book somewhere that explains, while the reader may recognize here an allusion to the literal authorial consciousness, Borges himself. Finally, the Library, as the universe, encapsulates all other possible symbolisms into itself, including its own status as an allegorical symbol for the story’s reader to decipher. The Library itself is therefore the final, infinite order of symbol: a self-reflexive universe-as-symbol, the Symbolist conception of reality as a symbolic order taken to an extreme.

The self-reflexive character of the Library as a symbol, of all that it contains and therefore of itself, derives from Symbolist aesthetics in which “the Symbolists made their poetry self-symbolizing” (Wheelock 17): art reflecting art as art, the omnipresent symbol ordering all reality as an artistic cipher. However, Borges’s ultimate aesthetic goals were hardly Symbolist, however much he may have borrowed from Symbolist method:

…the Symbolists apparently believed they could break out of the conceptual cosmos through intuition—through perception without conception. Borges knows that this is an esthetic delusion and that conception is inevitable. (Wheelock 17)

Carter Wheelock in The Mythmaker (1969) describes Borges’s aesthetic as one not of intuition but of epistemology, the process of intellectual conception itself, “expressed as the imminence of a revelation that never comes” in which the “esthetic moment occurs through the breach of reality” by the epistemological activation of presymbolic or anti-symbolic reality (6). That is to say, reality not ordered by symbol, but by “beliefs ... [that] are pregnant, and carry an unformulated idea” (Langer 81; qtd. Wheelock 5). Wheelock calls this perspective on reality the “mythic outlook” (4), the “universal vision” (12), or the Aleph: the perspective of infinite possibility in which there exists no empirical truth-value because “an idea’s value to the consciousness is the criterion of truth” (5). Wheelock contrasts Aleph with Zahir (both terms he borrows from stories by Borges). Zahir describes the limited, conceptual point of view with which reality is in any given instance necessarily comprehended by human beings. That is, Aleph, being infinite in scope, can never be comprehended as a totality; it can only be conceptualized in part according to some rationalized symbolic order that necessarily limits or effaces all other potential orders. This arbitrary conceptualization is Zahir. The pregnant moment in which the “revelation that never comes” seems about to be revealed—when deployment of Zahir becomes “a skeptical, fluid, shifting point of view” that simulates the epistemological totality of the Aleph—is Borges’s rescripted version of the Romanticist sublime (12-13): a moment of apparent but unrealized transcendence over finite conceptualization into infinite comprehension,  in which limited consciousness obsessively approaches but never achieves the “natural infinitude” that constitutes sublimity, in similar and divergent ways, for Romanticists and Symbolists alike (Weiskel 6).

The Library contains all books, and of these books certain ones are readable, and of the readable books certain ones are “true,” which is to say they propose to reveal some absolute truth-value. However, there is no possible criterion by which true books can be separated from false with any certainty; the narrator even speaks of “a proof of the falsity of the true catalog” of the Library. Furthermore any specific book can only be accessed by an infinite process of regression: “to locate Book A, first consult book B, which tells where Book A can be found; to locate Book B...” et cetera, ad infinitum (115-17). Rational or “Zahiric” consideration of the Library thus activates an “esthetic moment” in the form of epistemological paradox. That is, such consideration arrives upon both at once the Zahir—finite certainty of the existence of any given book—according to “rudiments of combinatorial analysis” (114)—and the Aleph—infinite uncertainty of accessing or comprehending any given book—according to statistical and rhetorical analysis. On the other hand, “Alephic” or mythic considerations—mystical beliefs in “books omnipotent, illustrated, magical” or a “librarian ... analogous to a god” (116)—presume to describe some transcendent truth-value for the Library while in fact proposing only another limited perspective—thus collapsing just as paradoxically into another Zahir.

In his irresolvable quest for truth-value that will resolve all paradoxes the narrator, anxiously discussing, accepting, rejecting, reconsidering all the different perspectives on the Library whether rational or mythic, Zahiric or Alephic, carries the reader through the “esthetic moment,” suspended throughout the story, of sublime epistemological pain on the brink of total revelation:

I cannot think it likely that there is such a total book [the “true catalog”] on some shelf in the universe. I pray to the unknown gods that some man—even a single man, tens of centuries ago, has perused and read that book. [...] Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be just one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification. (117)

The narrator concludes with a last attempt at resolution by conceptualizing a Zahiric Aleph, collapsing infinitely fragmented possibility into spherically ordered infinitude:

If an eternal traveler should journey in any direction, he would find after untold centuries that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder—which, repeated, becomes order: the Order. My solitude is cheered by that elegant hope. (118)

Transcendental Romanticists like Emerson described the sublime as an emotional state activated by “Revelation … an influx of the Divine mind into our mind,” a transcendent collapse of boundary between the “individual soul” and the Transcendentalist ideal of human community, the “universal soul” which is “that great nature in which we rest.” Emerson believed that this transcendence could be accomplished by deep introspection upon “the sources of nature … in his [man’s] own mind” (Emerson 1841). The Symbolists in general agreed upon the possibility of transcendence, but conceived it as being activated obliquely through allegory rather than achieved directly through introspective consideration. In “Library” and arguably throughout his work (as Wheelock goes to lengths to demonstrate), Borges calls for Emersonian introspection as far as it goes towards philosophical contemplation, and he makes use of Symbolist allegorical technique as has been shown. But he does all this only to assert that transcendence is not epistemologically possible, and that sublimity arises as a by-product of the always-already failed means of approaching transcendence.[6]

          By this point the ironical nature of Borges’s “Romanticism” is hopefully apparent as a result of his place in literary tradition: Borges deploys Romanticist and post-Romanticist techniques only to undercut the very premises of Romanticism and its successor genres. This essay will turn to nostalgia, in which Borges undercuts himself as an anti-Romanticist artist, in a later discussion of the final story here under consideration, “The South.” First, however, a word on Borges’s relationship to Gothicism.

In some ways Borges is fairly mercenary in his deployment of Gothic tropes, for example in “Library” using the decay of humanity (“I suspect that the human species—the only species—teeters at the verge of extinction”) as mere referent to the transcendent permanency of the story’s true subject: the Library which, “enlightened, solitary, infinite ... will endure” (117). If, however, I am accurate in asserting in a previous paper that Gothicism in general defies the possibility of transcendent “knowing” by locating sublimity “at the site of collapse of epistemological boundaries” (Suess 1), then Borges is genuinely Gothicist in his persistent deployment of an archetypal symbol of the epistemological tension between a priori and a posteriori. It is a space haunted by uncertainty, a symbol of bewildered intellect that evokes simultaneity of motion and arrest, and that offers resolution not as promise but as threat: the labyrinth.

          The Library—any library—is a kind of decentered labyrinth, as anyone who has become lost in the University of Houston stacks can attest.[7] But a more explicit labyrinth, and we will shortly turn to the labyrinth of “Death and the Compass,” better illustrates Borges’s relationship to Gothicism, not least through that tale’s connection to the detective stories of Poe. John Irwin, in The Mystery to a Solution (1994), argues that “Poe’s underlying project in the Dupin stories ... is the analysis of self-consciousness,” and that “it is on this deeper level of significance of the detective genre that Borges’s project situates itself” (xvii). Irwin justifies this claim throughout his book, but in general describes the relationship of the two authors as a shared emphasis on epistemological themes:

…Poe understands self-consciousness as an infinitely reflexive structure … Poe and Borges transform [ontotheology] into a quest not for God but for the structure of the self, transform it from a metaphysical quest in to the epistemological question of figuring the absolute, that impossible task of imaging something that, because it is infinite, cannot be bounded by a line. (xvii)[8]

This is essentially a phenomenological description of Wheelock’s scheme of Zahir and Aleph—the “impossible task” of translating limited rational knowledge into absolute (mythic, total, infinite) knowledge. To demonstrate, Irwin looks at Poe’s Dupin stories as analyses of analytical thinking, their solutions symbolizing the culmination of analysis into complete knowledge of their textual universes. But as the narrator of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” states, “the mental features discoursed of as analytical are, in themselves, little susceptible to analysis” (Poe 196). To analyze analysis is to potentially multiply the act of analysis into infinity. The reader of the Dupin stories analyzes the narrator’s analysis of Dupin’s analysis of a crime; on their face, the stories already have a triple order of analysis. But there remains to be analyzed the reader’s own act of analysis—which is to say, the reader yet remains unconscious of his/her self as a reader. If this next order of analysis is itself analyzed (i.e., if the reader thinks consciously about his/her act of reading, an easy enough step) there still arises a fifth order in the act of analyzing the analyzed analysis, and so on. Irwin goes into far more detail, but in short the Dupin stories suggest total knowledge, by proffering a solution, while in fact demonstrating that total knowledge is impossible. Total knowledge would somehow have to include knowledge of the act of knowing without creating yet another unconscious (i.e., unanalyzed, unknown) order of knowing-as-act. The reader is always one step below total consciousness of his/her self as a reader, and this is what Irwin means by describing self-consciousness as “infinitely reflexive”: conceptualization, that is to say consciousness, always depends upon a corresponding unconscious act.

An explicit manifestation of this dialectic of analytical consciousness—largely implicit in the Dupin stories—appears both formally and thematically in Borges’s “Death and the Compass.” This story is among the most overtly Gothic of Borges’s fictions, its first sentence emphasizing a mood of hauntedness and bewilderment: “Of the many problems on which Lönnrot’s reckless perspicacity was exercised, none was so strange—so rigorously strange, one might say—as the periodic series of bloody deeds that culminated at the Villa Triste-le-Roy” (Borges 147). This opening, furthermore, foreshadows a quasi-romantic quest narrative in the sense of a pursuit of some object (the source of the “bloody deeds”) external to the protagonist. Meanwhile the connection between “Death” and Poe’s detective stories is obvious from the first page, as Lönnrot is specifically named “an Auguste Dupin,” telegraphing the plot as one in which a solution will be sought by an experienced analytical thinker. The order of detective, criminal, and official moreover links “Death” back to Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” as Lönnrot mirrors Dupin, Scharlach mirrors Minister D, and the police commissioner Treviranus mirrors the Prefect (cf. Boldy 113). Explicit Gothicism arises in color-coding, particularly the recurrence of red in the names of the protagonist and antagonist, Erik Lönnrot and Dandy Red Scharlach (“rot” meaning “red” and “scharlach” meaning “scarlet” in German). The redness of the villain, Irwin incidentally points out, ties the story back to American Romanticist tradition via “the red slayer” of Emerson’s poem “Brahma,” “which Borges quotes in his 1947 essay on Whitman” (Irwin 35). More Gothic elements appear in the Old World anachronicity of the German names and “Triste-le-Roy” (an approximately French neologism: “sad king” or “King Sorrow”), in the baroque prevalence of harlequinade, in Lönnrot’s obsession with rabbinical mysticism, and, of course, in the labyrinth through which the detective moves in search of the mystery’s solution. The rest is style; most important to Borges’s aesthetic is this labyrinth, an analytical puzzle in which the potentiality of knowing is subverted by the very terms that make knowing possible.

          The plot of “Death” commences with a seemingly random murder: a rabbi of apparently high rank, “delegate … to the Third Talmudic Congress … Dr. Marcelo Yarmolinsky” is stabbed to death in the Hôtel du Nord on the night of December 3 (Borges 147). The police find in the rabbi’s room a great deal of Talmudic and Kabbalistic texts, including a piece of paper on which appears the single line, “The first letter of the Name has been written” (149)—in context, an apparent reference to the Tetragrammaton, the unutterable Hebrew name of God, YHWH. Treviranus believes the murder to be the result of an attempted robbery of “the sapphires of the Tetrarch of Galilee,” who is also staying in the hotel (148). Lönnrot disagrees on the grounds that such an explanation is “uninteresting” (148); having “a dead rabbi” on his hands, Lönnrot wants “a rabbinical solution” (Boldy 114). Thus when a newspaper writer interviews him about the murder, the detective “talk[s] about the many names of God;” the writer reports “that the famed detective Erik Lönnrot had taken up the study of the names of God in order to discover the name of the murderer.” On the third of January another murdered body is found at night “in the doorway of an old paint factory,” and scrawled on “the red and yellow rhombuses” of the factory wall are the words, “The second letter of the Name has been written.” On the night of February 3, during Carnival time, a man named Gryphius or Ginzburg is seen leaving a tavern in the company of “masked harlequins ... [decorated in] yellow, red, and green rhombuses,” after which he disappears. A spot of blood found in the man’s room suggests murder; written on the tavern blackboard by one of the harlequins, the phrase “The last letter of the Name has been written” confirms the connection to the other murders (151). On March 1, the police office receives a map of the city showing an equilateral triangle whose points are the locations of the three murders, along with an anonymous letter suggesting that the murder spree is over because of the perfect triangle’s mystical significance.

          The labyrinth in this story is primarily epistemological however much it physically takes place in a city (a double of Borges’s Buenos Aires flavored by Old World names and phrases [cf. The Total Library 424; qtd. Boldy 117]). The elements of this labyrinth, as Scharlach later points out, include “a dead hersiologue, a compass, an eighth-century cult, a Greek word, a dagger, the rhombuses of a paint factory” (Borges 155): an assortment of clues arranged in a geometric order whose connection seems obvious but whose significance demands careful analysis, i.e., “navigation” of the evidence. And it is a very easy labyrinth to get lost in, as Lönnrot finds. The significance of the number three seems on its face the key to a solution: three murders, each occurring on the third of the month; a first, second, and last “letter of the Name;” the “three years of war in the Carpathians” that Yarmolinsky had seen and the “three thousand years of pogroms” he as a Jew has inherited (147); the police commissioner’s name, Treviranus (roughly parsed in Latin as “three men,” from tre and vir). As this “threeness ... is absurdly overdetermined” (Boldy 115), however, Lönnrot notices the more subtle significance of the number four: the four letters of the Tetragrammaton, the diamond shape prominent in the second and third murders (the rhombuses and lozenges), and the fact (underlined in a book found at the site of the third murder) that the Jewish day begins at sundown, meaning rabbinically that each of the murders took place on the fourth day of the month. The numerical increase suggests an overt manifestation of the “infinitely reflexive” process of analysis Irwin finds in Poe (Irwin xvii), “an increasingly self-conscious analytical posture” leading to a “cumulative series of interpretations” whose multiplicity activates a Gothic epistemological sublimity in the sense of “intellectual vertigo” (11). Indeed, even as Lönnrot moves one step up from the anonymous letter’s insistence on an order of three—with a “drawing compass and a navigational compass” (Borges 152) drafting a mirrored triangle from the base of the triangle on the map, the point of the resultant diamond marking the spot at which the final murder must take place (and the final letter of the “secret Name” be written [154]) in the order of four, the house at the Villa Triste-le-Roy—a further analytical step fatally eludes him.

          The Triste-le-Roy itself activates the “intellectual vertigo” of multiplied interpretation, a physical labyrinth “abound[ing] in pointless symmetry and obsessive repetitions” to match the epistemological labyrinth of the mystery. Alone in the house, Lönnrot swiftly becomes disoriented by “facing mirrored walls” in which he “recede[s] infinitely,” by “identical courtyards,” rooms, and staircases that  altogether seem “infinite yet still growing.” Finally he reaches the belvedere, in the windows of which he again finds “lozenges ... yellow, red, and green.” (153-4). Suddenly, three men appear to capture and disarm Lönnrot. One of these is “the most famous gunman of the Southside, Dandy Red Scharlach,” who reveals himself as Lönnrot’s nemesis (152). “Three years ago,” Scharlach explains, Lönnrott had sent Scharlach’s brother to jail and seriously wounded Scharlach himself in a shoot-out. Convalescing in agony for “[n]ine days and nine nights” in the Triste-le-Roy, whose symmetry incited in him a “delirium” in which he “sensed that the world was a labyrinth,” Scharlach swore revenge “by all the gods of fevers and mirrors, to weave a labyrinth around the man who had imprisoned my brother” (155). Scharlach had read of Lönnrot’s interest in the names of God in the newpaper article on the Yarmolinsky murderer, and had seen his chance for vengeance in the very analytical thinking that made Lönnrot a “famed detective” (149). The second murder, along with the phrase regarding the Name, was staged, using the body of the first murderer Daniel Azevedo, who had accidentally killed Yarmolinsky while in fact trying to steal the Galilean Tetrarch’s sapphires on behalf of Scharlach. The appearance of the Name was an apparent coincidence in the first place, Yarmolinsky having written it immediately before Azevedo stumbled into his room, but Scharlach “realized that [Lönnrot] would conjecture” that one or more rabbinical heretics (“Hasidim” [Borges 155; cf. Boldy 115]) in search of the Name “had sacrificed the rabbi” (Borges 155). The third was an illusory murder, with Scharlach himself playing the part of Gryphius/Ginzburg, while the letter and map were likewise Scharlach’s doing. Anticipating that Lönnrot would eschew the lower orders of analysis—the uninteresting but realistically correct solution of the robbery gone wrong, and the more fascinating but incomplete numerology on the order of three—and transcend to “the missing [fourth] point ... that makes a perfect rhombus,” Scharlach waited to revenge himself and his brother at that point, in “the solitudes of Triste-le-Roy” (156). At the moment the labyrinth is solved, the moment in which the powers of analysis fail and mysticism and bewilderment collapse into terrible reality and understanding, Lönnrot finds his death: a perfectly Gothic epistemological moment.

          But Borges’s epistemological sublime is still more complex, and this is not yet the final order of analysis eluding the characters and the reader. Just before dying, Lönnrot critiques Scharlach’s labyrinth as too complicated, arguing that Scharlach might have made “‘a Greek labyrinth that is but one straight line,’” Zeno’s famous paradox of dichotomy, on the line of which “‘[s]o many philosophers have been lost’.” The paradox proposes that a traveler starting from one point can never reach a destination at another point however proximate to the first, because half of the distance between the two must first be crossed; then, half of the remaining distance must be crossed, then half of distance yet remaining, and so on to infinity. Lönnrot suggests, and Scharlach agrees, that should detective and criminal meet again in another life, Scharlach ought to “fake (or commit)” one crime at one location and a second at another location, then a third at location halfway between the first two, and then wait for Lönnrot at the halfway point between the first and the third (156). Irwin describes the effect of this final analysis as an oscillation between “infinite progression” and “infinite regression” toward the project of total self-consciousness as described above, an Aleph that can only be achieved by recourse to and abstracted Zahir in the form of a polygon (progression) or a line (regression):

This concluding image of infinite regression as the endless subdivision of a line inverts ... the figure of infinite progression evoked in the tale by the movement from a triangular to a quadrangular maze, which is to say ... the endless addition of sides to a polygon—the figure that symbolizes the attempt to integrate the process of thinking into the content of thought [...] [I]n the mind’s quest to comprehend itself totally ... infinite progression and infinite regression represent reciprocal paths to the idealized ground of the self [...] [T]his absoluteness of self-consciousness ... not only underlies the absolute means employed in quest of the self’s origin (i.e., infinite progression/regression) but also projects itself naturally into the [ontotheological] quest for a universal origin figured as a personified Absolute Consciousness, that Infinite Being whose consciousness is the one thing that is everything for every thing. (Irwin 35)

Lönnrot wishes to completely comprehend the mystery of the “Infinite Being” represented in the Tetragrammaton, thereby to himself achieve “Absolute Consciousness” of the clues and their solution by process of analysis, which is to say, using the terms from the above comments on “Library,” an Alephic comprehension. However, he achieves this completeness by necessarily interpolating a progressive Zahir, the polygon, into the terms of the mystery. As a result he sacrifices total knowledge both by neglecting the first order of analysis, the real solution of a botched robbery, and by failing to achieve consciousness of himself as an element in a plot, whether Scharlach’s or Borges’s. The progressive Zahir having failed him, he analyzes its shortcomings (“three sides too many in your labyrinth” [Borges 156]) and concludes instead upon a regressive Zahir, the infinitely divisible line. This Zahir, in which infinity (of divisibility) is contained in finitude (of length), comes closer to achieving the Aleph that Lönnrot seeks. Indeed, in so analyzing his achievement of Irwin’s ontotheological grail, “meet[ing] his maker” whether Scharlach as the knower of his mind or God as the personage beyond death (Irwin 35), and thus moving himself beyond his “maker” as its analyzer, Lönnrot affects something very like total consciousness of the labyrinth in which he has been caught.

But this is still not a final comprehension, and not only because Scharlach kills Lönnrot and the story concludes, thus wiping out Lönnrot’s consciousness altogether. That Lönnrot moves one step beyond his “maker” in terms of analysis returns him to the “infinite progression” of the polygon, paradoxically suggesting in the midst of regression that progression is yet a viable method of achieving “Absolute Consciousness.” Yet the reader, like Lönnrot himself, knows that analytical progression has already failed as a method of solving Scharlach’s labyrinth and thereby achieving total consciousness. The paradox cannot in fact be reduced. The solution to “Death” oscillates infinitely not only between progression and regression but within the story’s own numerology, between three and four—for example the Tetragrammaton as a four-letter word in fact made up of three letters, one of which is doubled (cf. Irwin 36)—and between two and higher numerical orders—the doubled letter, but also in the “nightmarish symmetries” of Triste-le-Roy (Boldy 118). The epistemological infinity (i.e., Aleph) of these oscillations, achieved wholly through rationalistic (i.e., Zahiric) analysis presuming toward Aleph, in the end activates in the reader the “fluid, shifting point of view” of the Borgesian sublime (Wheelock 12-13), a Gothic “instability of certain knowing” (Suess 4).

The labyrinth appears in many forms throughout Borges’s works, most obviously in the book-labyrinth of “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in the Cretan labyrinth revealed late in “The House of Asterion,” and in the abandoned ancient City in “The Immortal.” In all instances the labyrinth retains its epistemological Gothicism, forming a space both mental and (fictively) physical in which the possibility of possessing total knowledge—symbolized in the posited solution to the labyrinth—becomes an idealization impossible to attain and hold, undermined as it is by the real limitations of knowing represented in infinite oscillations or series of alternate interpretations. But Borges’s juxtaposition of the limitations of the real vis-a-vis the ideal should not be reduced to moralizing on one side or the other. That is, he does not “say” that infinitude is impossible, as a realist might, or that the through the finite one might realize an ideal of “natural infinitude” (Weiskel 6), as a Romanticist may be wont to do. His own position on ideals is more complicated, tending toward an almost obsessive desire for the ideal perpetually qualified by the obvious limitations of the reality in which he existed. His story “The South” makes this tension in its author explicit. A romanticized narrative of escape, the story plays two kinds of death—a favorite subject of Romanticists, Gothicists, artists in general—against each other. There is first “ordinary” death, death that is painful, humiliating, and impersonal; followed by “ideal” death, which could just as easily be called “Romantic” death as it is both nostalgic and heroic. Though this story undermines the reality of the ideal, Borges seems to decide in its favor in the end, which is to say at the moment of death itself, if only to allow dignity in death. If so, Borges may have found a way to overcome, in the dreams of fiction (or the fiction of dreams), his ethical and philosophical objections to romanticisms he conceived of as outmoded, even barbarous.

          “The South” is, as Jaime Alazraki points out, autobiographical in many elements (Alazraki 67; qtd. Bloom 101). The protagonist Johannes Dahlmann is like Borges the “secretary of a municipal library,” whose “romantic ancestor” like Borges’s grandfather was a heroic military man. Dahlmann develops septicemia and is hospitalized after hitting his head on “the edge of a recently painted casement window,” the same circumstances in which Borges developed septicemia in 1938.[9] The sick Dahlmann is taken to a sanatorium, where as he convalesces in pain on “the verge of death,” he comes to hate “every inch of himself; he hated his identity, his bodily needs, his humiliation.” Finally he is released, and is sent to recuperate in “one of the touchstones of his memory … the long pink-colored house” in Argentina’s South which he has purchased but not visited since childhood (Borges 174-5). Didier Jaén notes that “[i]n this story, traveling to the Argentinean South would be the equivalent of traveling to the American West in a Western romance or film” (Jaén 120-1; qtd. Bloom 107). Indeed, Dahlmann’s transition to the South is distinctly romanticized, involving a train ride across a clear border (“the other side of Avenida Rivadavia,” 176) from Dahlmann’s world of libraries and hospitals to a land “elemental … vast, but at the same time intimate and somehow secret … immense … perfect, if perhaps hostile.” The strange world to which Dahlmann has come is the sublime physical representation of his innermost desires of self, for Dahlmann has always “considered himself profoundly Argentine” despite “his Germanic blood” (174). After his train arrives at its terminus, Dahlmann eats at a country store as he waits on a carriage to take him the rest of the way to the house. While there, he is mocked by a group of young drunken gauchos, wild free men of a kind that exists “only in the South.” One of the men challenges Dahlmann to a knife fight; the still-invalid Dahlmann refuses on the grounds that he is himself unarmed. Just then a gaucho so old as to seem “outside time, in a sort of eternity,” a gaucho who stands for Dahlmann as “a symbol of the South (the South that belonged to him [Dahlmann]),” tosses a knife to the sick man (178). Dahlmann picks up the knife, though he has only the smallest idea how to use it, and in doing so “accepts the challenge” of the South. Though he knows he will almost certainly die, he feels that to die in a knife fight would be, compared to the kind of death that almost claimed him in the sanatorium, “a liberation, a joy, and a fiesta,” and he “steps out into the plains” (179). Dahlmann, and Borges through him, steps from the miserable present into the joyously romantic past. He accepts that world’s claim on him in a sublime moment in which death is stripped of its ignominy and exalted just as it was, in the minds of character and author, for the heroic grandfathers.

          But then, Borges is well-aware of the desire that feeds nostalgia; indeed, he called “The South” “a story of wishful thinking” (Jaén 120-1; qtd. Bloom 107). The images of the sanatorium recur throughout Dahlmann’s trip to the South. On the train ride he tries to read The Arabian Nights, a book he was seeking when he hit his head on the window. Upon his arrival Dahlmann mistakes a man for “one of the employees at the sanatorium” (178), and as he prepares to fight the gaucho, he reflects on how much better a death this will be than the one sickness promised him:

[h]e sensed that had he been able to choose or dream his death that night [his first night in the sanatorium], this is the death he would have dreamed or chosen. (179)

The ultimate implication—and Borges once described this as “the best” reading of the story (Barnstone 95; qtd. Bloom 101)—is that Dahlmann dies in the sanatorium. Just before his death “strapped with metal bands to a table” where “a man in a surgical mask stuck a needle in his arm,” however, Dahlmann has a dream which accounts for the bulk of Borges’s story. Dahlmann dreams of a romantic journey, a sublimely unspoiled world, and a glorious death of a kind not possible in modern times. He thereby escapes the dehumanized hospital death into a final dignity that justifies his humanity, his sense of self as an Argentine son of heroes.

If this reading is accurate, then “The South” may stand as Borges’s most deliberate and conspicuous connection to his Romanticist antecedents. For in this story Borges uses obviously generic elements of Romanticism—the doubled narrative of transcendent escape, from the sanatorium and from its indignity; the sublimities of a vast natural landscape and of the threat of death in the midst of joy; the nostalgia for a better world that was and the potential for transcendence into it—to reveal that however much one may sense or desire a romantic world, such a world exists only in dreams, in desire itself. Both of the stories treated here earlier perform the opposite task. “The Library of Babel” and “Death and the Compass” in their particular ways suggest that transcendence beyond the finite such as Emerson yearned for is unattainable, and that sublimity exists only in the impossible quest to achieve infinity. Meanwhile, “The South” as a nostalgist’s romantic dream suggests that the assumptions of Romanticism, so thoroughly upset in the preceding stories, do have worth in a modern world in which those assumptions can no longer be taken for granted. Romanticist techniques as Borges deploys them in his fiction themselves disprove those assumptions, but this is only to say that romance is false as a generic depiction of reality, of the epistemologically limited human world of learning and experience. According to the less rationalistic vicissitudes of the self, however, Borges’s rescripted Romanticism reveals the genre’s modern worth as a fictive activation of desire, and of the potential of fictively realized desire to alleviate sorrow and pain in the face of death. The romanticized world-that-was can never return. It likely never existed at all, being almost certainly an idealized misrecognition of the past scripted by the past’s own romantic notions attenuated into the present. But in Borges’s treatment it seems that the realization of impossibly romantic ideals may be finally feasible through fiction, whether his own or more generally the fictions of the mind as such, if only when imminent death truly frees one from the responsibilities of living in the world-that-is.

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